DOMAIN FIVE

Nutrition
EXAM WEIGHT 19% / CHAPTERS REFERENCED 17-20
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Nutrition
To be skilled as a professional trainer you’ll need proficiency in the sciences and applications of nutrition.
Professional fitness training without the support of nutrition is a disservice to a client. The demands you’ll
be placing on their bodies through increased physical activity and a uniquely designed exercise program
need to be supported with the right type of fuel. Further, with obesity as an epidemic, the application of
nutrition and eating habits of clients will be critical in your success as a professional fitness trainer.

NUTRITION INTRO
Although you should know about nutrition when working with clients, keep in mind each state has specific
regulations that dictate the legality of offering recommendations on nutrition and supplementation. Further,
any time you’re working with a client who has nutrition deficiencies or chronic condition specific to their diet,
you should always refer to a dietitian and work with the physician. For example, when working with a client
with diabetes or hypertension, a regimented nutrition plan is not only important for their fitness but also
their overall health. In these instances, your scope of practice will require you to make sure they are working
with a credentialed dietitian.
Nutrition is often the most important limiting factor for clients. This is because almost every health
marker is impacted by the foods and drinks we consume. Good nutrition can change a client’s health and
appearance most dramatically.

CALORIES AND MACRONUTRIENTS

The food we ingest comes in the form of potential energy, which is energy that’s stored in a physical system
and has the potential to be converted into work, or kinetic energy.
• A calorie is a unit of heat needed to raise the temperature of 1 kilogram of water 1 degree Celsius
at 1 atmosphere. They are often represented as kcal, which means 1,000 calories.
• Calories become a focal point of diets because there are 3,500 calories per pound of body fat. So, a
negative energy balance is how a client achieves weight loss. Careful nutrition and strength training
are important because a negative energy balance can also result in loss of lean body mass.
Total energy expenditure is the sum of a client’s resting metabolic rate, physical activity, and thermic effect
of food.
Macronutrients are a category of nutrients that are present in foods in high amounts and includes
carbohydrates, proteins, and fats.

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Carbohydrates have 4 calories per 1 gram

Carbs are important because they provide the fastest acting (and most readily available) macronutrient
source for energy transfer and their storage in the body is limited.
They are composed of:
• Carbon
• Hydrogen
• Oxygen
The process of carbohydrate digestion breaks up the larger chemical structures into glucose, fructose, or
sucrose. These are carbohydrate monosaccharides, and the only form our bodies can readily absorb.
• Glucose is the main circulating sugar and the major energy source of the body.
There are five pathways through which carbs can travel to help with ATP generation. They include:
• Glycogenesis - the formation of glycogen to nutrition
• Glycogenolysis - process from glycogen to glucose
• Glycolysis - the production of pyruvate from glucose
• Krebs cycle and electron transport chain - acetyl CoA to ATP and CO2 to H2O
• Gluconeogenesis - the production of glucose from non-carb sources
Carbohydrates in the diet are found in:
• Sugars
• Starches
• Fibers

Proteins have 4 calories per 1 gram

The smallest unit of protein is the amino acids and these are the building blocks of protein. They’re made
up of:
• Carbon
• Hydrogen
• Oxygen
• Nitrogen

Fats have 9 calories per 1 gram

The simplest unit of fat is a fatty acid. Fatty acids are important on a cellular level because they help make

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up the phospholipid bilayer, the component of the cell membrane.

They can be classified as saturated and unsaturated.
• Unsaturated fatty acids can be broken down into monounsaturated fatty acids and polyunsaturated
fatty acids.
• Omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids are examples of polyunsaturated fatty acids. There should be a
balance of both in the diet.

MICRONUTRIENTS AND WATER

A micronutrient is a chemical element or substance required in trace amounts for the normal growth and
development of living organisms and includes vitamins and minerals.
Vitamins are organic food substances (in plants and animals) and are essential in small quantities from our
diet. They’re divided into two categories.
• Fat soluble:
°° Vitamin A
°° Vitamin D
°° Vitamin E
°° Vitamin K
• Water soluble:
°° Vitamins B
°° Vitamin C
Water is essential to life, making up 60% of total body weight. Therefore, maintaining adequate fluid balance
is essential to performance. The average client should be consuming 3 liters of water per day

NUTRITION BEHAVIORS AND COACHING

Calorie counting is an excellent way to track exactly how much a client is eating each day, especially in
weight loss instances. However, it’s not always realistic to maintain. Further, calorie counting is time-
consuming, difficult, and often inaccurate. For a better approach, fitness professionals can teach clients
more realistic ways of quickly measuring how much they eat. These are starting measurement guidelines:
• Protein portions - one palm
• Veggie portions - one fist
• Carbohydrate portions - cupped hand

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• Fat portions - size of a thumb

As an alternative to exact calorie counting, clients can be encouraged to keep a food journal because of its
positive reinforcement outcomes. Meal frequency should be determined according to how the client’s body
responds and what they prefer.
Portion sizes for meals should be enough to sustain the next three hours of expected activity. Using hand
portions, fitness professionals can make the following recommendations to clients (assuming they’re eating
4 meals a day without other medical conditions).
For male clients recommend (per meal):
• Two palms of protein dense food
• Two fists of veggies
• Two cupped hands of carb dense foods
• Two thumbs of fat
For female clients (per meal):
• One palm of protein
• One fist of veggies
• One cupped hand of carbs
• One thumb of fat

WEIGHT LOSS
When developing a weight loss program for clients, identifying their limiting factors will help achieve
success. Limiting factors, simply put, are barriers standing in the way of them accomplishing their goals.
Although there are many, the most common limiting factors are:
• Genetics which can sometimes prevent a client from achieving their upper limits of performance.
However, this limiting factor is in rare and extreme circumstances because most people will
not surpass their health and fitness potential.
• Adequate exercise and physical activity can often be one of the barriers keeping a client from
reaching their weight loss goals.
• Physiology when imbalanced can make weight loss more difficult if it creates hormonal issues,
metabolic issues, and neurotransmitter issues. However, even in the situation where physiology is a
limiting factor, it rarely prevents a client from participating in physical activity and healthy nutrition.
• Mindset often prevents clients from achieving long term weight loss goals. This is because every
behavior or action always starts with a specific mindset. Therefore, the internal dialogue we have can

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be a limiting factor with our weight loss.

Other limiting factors to good nutrition include:
• Lack of sleep and recovery which can create false hunger
• Weekends, and when this happens, the trainer should look into the psychology behind the client’s
thinking.
When working with weight loss clients who exercise 5 or more hours per week, if they cease losing their
weight, you should consider reducing their daily caloric intake by 250 per day.
As you work with clients to help them establish healthier eating habits, it’s important to keep the most
critical rule in mind: the best diet is the one that works for the client. Further, all good nutrition is outcome-
based. This means the outcomes resulting from nutrition should be the best indicators of whether the
program is working. If clients aren’t getting the results they want from a nutrition plan, then either the plan
needs to be changed or the outcomes need to be changed.

SUPPLEMENTATION
Before making supplement recommendations, and as a general guideline, the majority of clients’ foods
should be made up of whole foods. Common supplements are:
• Protein powder, which should be limited to two servings or 25 – 50g per day to avoid replacing the
benefit of nutrient-dense whole food sources.
• Fish oil supplements such as Omega 3 are rich in DHA and EPA can help with decreased
inflammation, increased metabolic rate, improved fat burning, insulin tolerance, and more.
• Vitamin D has benefits such as decreasing cancer risk, increasing bone density, improving mood,
and improved fitness performance.
• General multivitamin to prevent common nutrient deficiencies. Specifically, with plant-based food
dieters, they’ll want a multivitamin with iron in it.
• Caffeine increases the rate of fatty acid metabolism and decreases the rate of carbohydrate
metabolism during aerobic exercise.
• Magnesium supplements assist in the muscle contraction, immunity, and regulation of blood sugar.
• 74% of Americans are eating fewer than 3 servings of greens per day, which means clients will be
turning to greens supplements. While greens supplement can’t and shouldn’t replace greens in the
diet, 1 serving can be supplemented with a reputable greens replacement.

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TRENDING DIETS AND WORKING WITH CLIENTS

Trending diets are important for trainers to know because of how often clients will follow them prior to
seeking nutrition recommendations. Some key things to know about trending diets include:
• Ketosis is an abnormal increase of ketone bodies in the body and is usually the result of a low-
carbohydrate diet, fasting, or starvation.
• Clients wishing to follow a gluten-free diet are becoming more and more frequent. In the event you
have a client with diagnosed celiac disease, you must refer them to a dietitian before making any
gluten-free recommendations.
An important part of working with clients on nutrition is being able to effectively coach individuals into
healthy habits. To be effective at empathetic coaching, you’ll need to:
• Listen to what the client wants to accomplish and what they need from their program.
• Learn about their current lifestyle so you can match the program closely to something that already
works for them.
• Discover what’s most important and how they balance their life.
• Work together in a way that creates a program you both have collaborated on and agree to.

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